Rhymesaurus Review

Does the dinosaur live upto the hype?

Submitted by khazanaghar on Mon, 2009-05-04 20:33.
Author's Product Rating:
Ease of Use: 
Effectiveness: 
Help/Support: 
The lowest price: 31.46$
You can buy it at RegNow for that price.
Pros:
The help file is well-written and should easily get you used to the way the software operates and quickly help you take advantage of the very powerful features here. Searches return lots of options and offer much room for creativity and originality.
Cons:
No scribble pad included in software for note-taking, so you have to have notepad or word processor open. You also don't have a way to save searches.
Review:

If you are a composer/songwriter, a poet, or someone who works with rhymes, limericks, creating catchy slogans, etc., one tool to add to your arsenal is a good rhyming dictionary/program. There are quite a few of these out there, from the very inexpensive to the slightly-heavier-on-the-wallet-in-comparison type. It really depends on what you are looking for.

Here is a review of Rhymesaurus, an offering from Purple Room Publishing, which purports to be one of the best rhyming dictionaries out there. Having tried a few of these myself, I was rather eager to test this beast out and see if it actually lives up to the hype.
Installation was pretty straightforward and smooth, without any glitches.

The interface seems rather austere-looking, but that is really deceiving, because there truly resides a powerful dinosaur (rhymesaurus?) behind this sparse outward appearance. I was quite surprised at what the program delivered, and how well.

Simply type in a word, and you are ready to go. When you search for a word, there are 6 major sources you can look in (the help file calls these ‘reference works’): dictionary, thesaurus, rhymes, sounds like, wordsurf and pattern.

The rhyming dictionary is capable of conducting 21 types of rhyme-searches, and this is pretty exhaustive and goes really deep. You can have perfect rhymes, where all the syllables rhyme, or you can have the final syllable rhyme; you can have reverse rhymes, assonance, homophones, and even rather unusual ones like amphisbaenic rhyme (the meaning of which I had to look up), which is a case where the final syllable of one word is the reversal of the final syllable of another. By the time you go through all the 21 options, you really have more options than you need.

In most of the ‘sources’ or reference works, there are two algorithms that are explored: the simpler one called ‘soundex’, and the more complex one called metaphone. These are very intelligent algorithms and should more than suffice for any purpose anyone might have.
The help file is well-written and should easily get you used to the way the software operates and quickly help you take advantage of the very powerful features here.

How does it compare? There are other programs like Rhymesaurus too, like MasterWriter from 4th Dimension, for example, which is a great program as well. To satisfy my curiosity, I used a word like ‘hello’ as a search in both programs. In MasterWriter, the search returned only about 10% of the options that Rhymesaurus gave me. So in that department, Rhymesaurus scored way better. Of course, there are some other options that MasterWriter offers, such as phrases, alliterations, pop-culture, etc. But when you consider that MasterWriter is over 3 times the price of Rhymesaurus, you can easily overlook smaller omissions, and focus on the main attributes, which of course, in this case is rhyming.

One neat addition to have would be a small notepad for jotting down ideas within the program. Of course, this is not really such a problem, because you could easily have a word-processor running alongside, but it does mean having to open up another program and retrieve another file, switching back and forth between windows, as well as assign some memory to that. Perhaps this is something that could be considered in future upgrades. This is a feauture MasterWriter does offer.

Another function I missed having is being able to save searches or related searches, which MasterWriter offers. The advantage with this would be that you could just load up a certain file and it would load up all the various options you had searched for earlier under a certain topic, as well as have all your notes which you intend to search for or ideas you had jotted down to come back to later.

Conclusion:

Rhymesaurus is really impressive, and at a price like that, as a professional, or even a hobbyist, you can’t afford to pass this up. It does take a bit of getting used to all the various options that are on offer here, but you could also start right away at entry level simply by typing in a word of your choice and get going. But seriously, once you get used to the technical terminology used in the program, it really scores high on the intelligence department, in that the way it approaches various searches is far more thorough than you or I would even dream of. Creatively, this could be a good thing, and can help you really think “out of the box”. There are plenty of options available with each search, and that is not a bad thing, except you could really get tripped off looking at the goodies that show up in terms of options, and if that happens, it will hinder your creativity. But if you can curb your daisy-picking tendencies, this is a sure winner from Purple Room Publishing, a tool in your arsenal you would be glad to have, one that will enhance your productions and compositions and creatively used, it can help you stay off the clichéd and hackneyed route.